Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

December 28, 2013

Cameron has been shouting loudly from the rooftops that he wants to protect children and to limit access to pornographic material (while providing little or no help to the people who are actually doing this work), primarily by bullying ISPs into compliance. Well, now we're seeing exactly what's coming out of this; valuable websites providing good and helpful information being blocked. BT have launched their own filter, and it covers a much, much wider set of sites: those that show pornography (and we still don't have a legal definition of exactly what this is), refer to illegal drugs, those that promote self harm, the ability to block nudity, social networking and gaming for example. It's also possible to block access to sex education sites and search engines.

Now, you may well say that there's no real issue with that, but what's also getting blocked are sites such as bishUK, which provides sexual advice to teenagers, and Edinburgh Women's rape and sexual abuse centre which is blocked as 'pornographic'. Sexual Health Scotland, Doncaster Domestic Abuse Service, and Reducing the Risk of Domestic Violence are also blocked. Now, we could write this off as collateral damage - mistakes do occur and they can always be put right. That's true, but it may be too late for some people who need information there and then; saying 'oops, sorry' to an abused person isn't terribly effective. But let's look further - the BT filters supported blocking "sites where the main purpose is to provide information on subjects such as respect for a partner, abortion, gay and lesbian lifestyle, contraceptive, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy." According to the New Statesman, BT has now removed the words 'gay and lesbian', which is rather too little, too late. Does this mean that filters have changed? The reference was gone overnight, and BT are using a third party to produce their filters, so I'm doubtful that much has changed, other than the wording.

Who created the list of 'gay and lesbian' lifestyle sites? Why? What control is there over such discriminatory organisations, and who thought it was a good idea to do it in the first place? This is not collateral damage - this is a deliberate attempt to block access to perfectly legal and acceptable material. Once there is a process in place to block access to material - of any sort - it's far too easy to extend its use into any subject area. Of course, if it's done by a private company that we can't control, the Government can wash its hands; 'nothing to do with us guv'.

However, there is a vague solution in the form of a Google Chrome extension called 'Go Away Cameron'. This doesn't keep a list of blocked sites, it can simply be activated if and when you run up against a blocked site. Clicking the bookmarklet unblocks the site, allowing you to view it. The extension is a private proxy service, which isn't illegal to use, but it does require a level of trust with the person providing it, since the extension needs to access Chrome's tabs and browing activities, but since just about all of us don't have that many issues with people like Google and Bing watching what we're doing, that's not a real problem. The real problem is a Government that wants to set up an infrastructure that allows state censorship at any level, at any time through the backdoor method of unregulated service providers.

December 11, 2013

describes itself as a Free Social Media Search Engine and it's been around for a while; in fact I blogged it back in August of 2012 and thought favourably of it. It's now undertaken a really massive overhaul, and it's entered my list of 'social media search engines to watch'. You can use it without registering, but if you register, you can save your searches. Results are in three columns - Facebook, Twitter and Google+ - I haven't seen any other search engines give content in that mix before, and I found the comparision element really useful.

However, there is a lot more useful material than just recent postings. There's a helpful analytics section, with sections on sentiment, users, domains, types of post, keywords, popular results and much more besides. It does seem to have a few bugs - it didn't want to search for #hashtags - or if it did, it took so long I wasn't waiting any longer, and some of the results seem to be incorrect, but that could easily be because the tool they're using (eg Facebook search) is the one failing, not them.

In summary, it's a good addition to the collection of social media search engines out there, and worth a look.

There are times when you want to get a little bit more indepth with the searches that you're running. Rather than just looking at the normal run of the mill websites you might want to try reading some articles about a person, subject or event. There's a really interesting new twist that you can do quickly and simply to get that material right away.

Here's a search on President Obama:

Pretty much what you'd expect - newsy stuff and then straight into the traditional websites. However, look up at the URL at the top of the screen, and this is what you'll see, or something very similar, depending on your browser and how you've searched:

https://www.google.com/#q=president+obama

If you edit that URL to add &ida_m=1 at the end of it thus:

https://www.google.com/#q=president+obama&ida_m=1 the URL rearranges itself automatically to https://www.google.com/#ida_m=1&q=president+obama and gives the following result:

We're immediately jumping into a variety of articles from magazines and journals. It doesn't work for everything that you search for, but I got good material about 50% of the time. So make a note - &ida_m=1is your new Google friend.